♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -In the first half of the 20th century, in the leafy West End of Hartford, Connecticut, the owner of this handsome house wakes up alone in his bedroom study opposite the wing where his wife and daughter sleep.

Breakfasting on tea imported from Ceylon, regarding a new painting just arrived from France, or a carving from China.

He takes a turn in Elizabeth Park before making his way to the insurance company, the Hartford Accident and Indemnity, where he serves as vice president.

On these routine walks, the poet Wallace Stevens scribbles ideas and images he has his secretaries type up for him.

After work, he turns these notes into the lush, abstract poems that make him one of the most admired poets of the 20th century.

-How could someone whose poems are advocates of the imagination be so suburban?

-With some of his middle-class inclinations, you're left trying to figure out whether this roots him or whether it diminishes him.

Would he be better off if he was a little less bourgeois?

-The pictures on the wall, the vases, the apples that have just arrived from Oregon.

-He didn't go very many places, but he brought the world to his house.

He had this great appreciation for things.

-Robert Frost once complained that Stevens wrote mostly about bric-a-brac.

And a collection of adages published after Stevens' death opens with the jarring assertion "Happiness is an acquisition."

Other adages confess the poet's attachment to places over people.

Can a poet short on human sympathy still matter to 21st-century readers?

I explored this question with a diverse group of interpreters, including 3 longtime fans of Stevens and also 8 others new to his work, including 4 National Student Poets, as well as a psychologist, a former Treasury Secretary, an actor, and an ice cream maker.

We began with Stevens' famous early work "The Emperor of Ice-Cream."

-This poem is known in a largely misunderstood fashion by many of my customers because I think they believe it's kind of a happy poem about a guy usually associated with the good feelings that people have when they eat ice cream.

And the poem is much different.

-Let's just hear your big old jolly reading of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream."

-It doesn't feel that jolly to me.

♪♪ ♪♪ -It's kind of, like, opening with, like, a bang.

[ Up-tempo music plays ] -From the first line, "Call out the roller of big cigars," it's like we are at a carnival and we are at a circus.

It's summer.

It's hot.

We're eating ice cream.

-All of the sensual pleasure that comes from eating something fattening and delicious and just sugary and lovely.

-People are constantly looking for new things and new experiences, and so why not have that new thing or new experience in ice cream?

-"Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds."

-You're getting so much sensuality.

-It's so like, yeah, I want one of those.

[ Laughs ] [ Woman laughs ] -Stevens' opening reference to cigar rollers suggests that the poem was inspired by his experiences in Key West, Florida, a short hop from Cuba, where at the plush Casa Marina Resort, he yearly escaped his chilly marriage and the obligations and inhibitions of his role at the Hartford.

Dozens of Stevens' poems make the tropics a domain of pleasures, or perhaps fantasies conjured by the word "concupiscent."

-I think he just wanted to do something alliterative.

But "concupiscent" is a word that is associated with sex.

-You know, everybody's muscular.

There are these big kind of cigars.

I mean, I'm not that kind of psychologist, but cigar is not always just a cigar.

You know what I mean?

-"Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers."

-We've got these people flirting and making ice cream and hanging out, and it's kind of joyful in there.

♪♪ -...and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers."

-It's last month's newspaper.

Time is passing.

There is a quality in this poem of, the calendar is flying by.

-Last month's newspapers are kind of, "Oh, this is already, like, kind of gone."

And time kind of governs ice cream.

-Ice cream melts.

-It's an evocation of the passing of time, maybe an intimation of death or final things.

-One of the things we know about happiness is that, oddly enough, we can feel happier when we're reminded about how short-lived some sensual pleasure is going to be.

So when you think about the end of the ice cream cone... ♪♪ -"Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

-"Let be be finale of seem" -- It is about as abstract a statement as you could get.

-"Let be be."

He seems like he's doing philosophical work.

-"Seem" is, you know, what we are -- kind of, like, believe to perceive and "be" is the actual reality.

-Let there be no difference between the way things seem and the how they really are.

-"Finale of seem" sounds like "ta-da!"

-Right.

-I love the way "finale" is used there because "finale" is a little dramatic.

-Every line, but the final line of each stanza is an order.

"Call him."

"Bid him."

"Let the boys do this."

"Let be."

He's a maker, creator, entertainer.

[ Crowd cheering ] -Let's not forget the most famous line of "let be" ever, right?

"Let there be light."

-So you're reminding us that this is a poem about the beauty of creation.

-The whole thing is a magic act.

"Let this be.

Let's invent this.

Poof.

Look what I've done."

♪♪ -These sensual pleasures, they are kingly.

You know, they are the emperor.

-It's fun at this point to remember that a stanza is a room.

And this poem is a really simple blueprint for a little house.

To get to the second stanza, you could imagine that break is the little hallway from room to room.

-"Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb."

-In the first stanza, you have the different things that people are doing.

In this one, somebody has died.

-They're in the woman's house at the viewing of the body or at a wake.

And the flowers that they have brought have not so much been romantic as maybe the flowers one would bring to visit the deceased.

-This obviously is a poor woman.

"Take from the dresser of deal."

It's a cheap kind of wood.

It didn't have knobs.

-"Three glass knobs."

Those are all stressed words.

Right?

So we have this particular detail.

-There's an intimacy to the three glass knobs that are lacking in that you imagine the knobs have been lacking because they have been used and worn and touched.

-...that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once."

-The fantail rim is a border of a sheet or a quilt.

It's a little flourish.

-So it's a special sheet.

-She had this little sheet.

She made a prettier thing out of it.

-They take the sheet out of the drawer that she once made into art.

It's not just a sheet.

It's her art.

-Stevens truly appreciated not only the thing in itself, but the hand behind it.

So this is like a stand-in for the poem itself.

This is this sheet, like a sheet of paper, you know, on which she embroidered fantails once, as he does with his language.

-Embroidered fantails, like bouquets, like cigars, like ice cream are made things, created to serve human pleasure.

Death has no use for any of them.

-"And spread it so to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb."

-If you want to see dead, look at feet.

-Stevens is reminding us that death is around the corner.

"Let the lamp affix its beam."

-Put a light on it.

You know, like, shed light on that part that you would wish to conceal.

-It's some sort of unsympathetic headlight or harsh overhead light.

-It's a lamp.

It is a very kind of quotidian, small thing.

But it's a revelation of a kind.

-"Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

-That takes us back to where we were before.

♪♪ What really only exists is carpe diem, seize the moment.

Enjoy your ice cream.

-♪ Why, I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream ♪ ♪ Rah, rah, rah ♪ ♪♪ -On hearing that his colleague Wallace Stevens had suffered a heart attack, Stevens' boss at the Hartford remarked that he didn't know Stevens had a heart.

At work, Stevens preserved a remote and superior distance, but on social occasions, after three or four martinis, he could get nasty.

Stevens held attitudes about those he considered inferior -- Jews, Poles, all people of color, that he did not hesitate to utter or to put in print.

-Every kind of insult.

Absolutely.

He goes there.

-There are reasons not to like Stevens.

-It's not even clear that Wallace Stevens liked Stevens.

In later years, he avoided leaving Hartford, retreating after work to his study.

To allay boredom, he ordered up luxuries and rearranged new purchases in his room.

But his poems take the quest for novelty much further, realizing the modernist dictum to make it new, to rediscover the color and vibrancy within the most commonplace experiences.

In the 1947 poem "Motive for Metaphor," he shows language's power to make the ordinary into art.

♪♪ ♪♪ -There's so much mystery in that.

-He's captured the autumn, but not the not uninteresting question, it seems to me, is, why did he choose not to describe that more literally?

Some level of abstraction, but much less abstract than the really high level of abstraction that he chose.

-The poem's final word, "X," is the ultimate abstraction.

"X" stands for anything.

And its first word, "you," is similarly abstract.

"You" can mean anybody.

-"You like it under the trees in autumn."

You think, "Well, who is 'you'?"

You like it?

-That could be the singular "you" or the universal "you."

-Stevens, of course, spent his work life considering this universal, impersonal you.

-An insurance executive looks at a vast number of instances and then try to make a judgment as to what the probability will be for the average of all those people.

-"You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead."

-It begins in an autumnal mood, whether or not you're talking about the season or you're talking about the time of life.

-"The wind moves."

Wonderful.

But "like a cripple among the leaves"?

So there's something really decrepit or hurt or harmed about all that.

-It is paradoxically by connecting unlike, rather than like things, that metaphors do their work, so triggering feelings that lie beneath plain logic or description.

-The metaphor is a way to not say, "Here is how it is," but to say, "This is what I feel like."

[ Wind blowing ] -"The wind repeats words without meaning."

-Things in nature exist outside of human perception.

They aren't something that has been spoken through or translated through language.

-You don't actually need to know what the words mean to know what the words mean.

I mean, there is a real kind of sense-making with the sound.

-As a modernist, Stevens brings sound to the fore.

Note how the poem's very title, "Motive for Metaphor," strums a musical riff -- motive for metaphor, motive for metaphor -- and thus inaugurates this sense-making through sound.

Long "e" sounds dominate the first stanza -- "trees," "leaves," "repeats," "meaning" -- so that the short "e" sound of "dead," though visually part of the pattern, stuns with its difference.

The long "i" of "like" is sustained through "slightly," "brighter," and "sky," but the shift in season allows the clipped "i's" of the first stanza as if coaxed open by more temperate air to lengthen, to "spring," "things," "melting," "single."

Thus through sound, fall and spring, though different, become metaphors for each other.

-Well, one thing, also, both of those things are getting towards is, they're both metaphors for change.

-Spring is new to me because I grew up in Australia.

We don't really have spring.

I walk past this bunch of trees and bushes, and you could almost see the colors of the flowers.

I can see a little bit of the -- you know, "the half colors of quarter-things."

They're not quite what they're gonna be.

-Stevens' art collection reveals the influence of modernist painting on this poet.

The "half colors of quarter-things" show a world changing, but also one the artist, painter, or poet changes through his own subtle layerings.

-It's not clear.

He loves opacity and he loves change because change brings opacity.

-"The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be."

-You are just like the melting clouds, like the half colors of quarter-things.

You're, like, constantly in transition.

You're not feeling that you have to be some fixed version of yourself.

-"Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The ABC of being, The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue."

-This is where you need to parse the sentence and look at the actual grammar of the thing.

Here we are "desiring the exhilarations of changes," and then here's that colon.

And so this must be the motive for metaphor.

-That's what the motive for metaphor is -- to compare something that's not like something else and the comparing creates change.

Change is exhilarating.

-...shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The ABC of being."

-What is the dichotomy between the ABC's of being and the language that we are making?

I think it's to resist clarity.

-As in "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," the last stanzas of "Motive for Metaphor" shine a light on unadorned being, that stark reality that comes before our acts of imagination.

Primary noon, the primary colors red and blue, and the unused letters of the alphabet are all examples of being not yet given expression.

-"The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound -- Steel against intimation -- the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X."

-That last stanza is so obscure.

"Steel against intimation"?

Like, there's no such thing as steel against intimation.

And yet I'm there.

-There's the same debate between the hard slicing fact of the world and the intimations of things, how they may seem.

-Don't forget in the poem "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" -- "Let be be finale of seem."

-Being is supposedly the equivalence of reality.

But he wants seeming.

Always.

-He wants seeming.

-Yes.

-He wants seeming always.

-Right.

-In that final X, we see the culmination of the debate between steel and intimation.

X simultaneously strips down to fact and opens up possibility.

-When I think of an X, or at least how I think of it here, I think of it as, like, a crossing out.

-That X is a gun sight.

-X is such a fixed letter.

It's such a hammer strike.

-X marks the spot.

-Exactly.

X marks the spot.

But also there is a kind of turn in this poem that comes back to the beginning because X is what we use to mean anything.

It means everything.

-It is an unknown.

It's a thing that stands in for something else.

-It's, like, a variable.

It feels like it's incomplete.

-You know, the whole poem is talking about how that -- that space of not fully knowing is what is exhilarating.

♪♪ -One of the reasons I love this poem is that there's this idea that you can kind of control your own sensory experience.

You can kind of own it.

-I believe in the power of a rich interior life to make a world worth living in.

And I think Stevens does that and interrogates it and pulls at it.

-He's saying that we have a choice to live a poetic life, not necessarily writing poetry, but to see the mystery in things.

[ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪